XnView Shell Extension Adds Right-Click Image Muscle

by Lee Mathews Jul 31st 2008

Launching a full-blown application to perform quick image manipulation tasks - like format conversion and scaling - can be a time consuming pain in the butt. The XnView shell extension makes short work of those chores, adding graphical manipulation goodness to your Windows explorer right-click menu.

As pictured, the shell extension appears in your context menu, though you can choose to have it displayed as a sub-menu. It'll give you a brief heads up about your image, including a thumbnail, dimensions, and file size.

Single click conversion supports most common image types, including PNG, JPG, GIF, TIF, BMP, PCX, and TGA. Execute "convert into" and your new image appears almost instantly.

Using the "Convert..." option gives you more complete control, offering just about any graphic format you'd ever want to use, quality tuning, resizing, and the ability to choose a destination folder.

As if it wasn't useful enough already, you can also copy your selected image to the clipboard for easy pasting into your photo editor or documents, upload it to ImageShack, and set it to your wallpaper - with options for centering and scaling.

For quick image tasks, this is definitely a nice addition to your context menu Swiss Army Knife. It's available for 32 and 64-bit Windows and even works in Vista.

[ via Freeware Genius ]

Tags: image, image editing, image manipulation, ImageEditing, ImageManipulation, thumbnail, xnview

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

BurningChicken said 2:30PM on 7-31-2008

It seems this could be useful for a select group of people. I can't stand a cluttered context menu though.

Lee Mathews said 5:02PM on 7-31-2008

You can set it to display in a submenu, then there's only a single line added to your main context menu.

jfjb said 5:02PM on 7-31-2008

welcome to the world of being late or not reading the manual

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